Based on the premise that the true Home of the Groove, at least on the North American landmass, is the irreplaceable musical and cultural nexus, New Orleans, Louisiana and environs, this audioblog features rare, hard to find, often forgotten, vintage New Orleans-related R&B and funk records with commentary. Some general knowledge of N.O. music is helpful here, but not required to get your groove on.

About Me

I currently host a weekly show, "Funkify Your Life", on KRVS 88.7 FM in Lafayette which includes music covered on HOTG and more. You can listen-in live Thursdays at 1:00 PM or to the rebroadcast Fridays at 9:00 PM, or stream shows on demand and see playlists at the station website under the Programs tab. I am a former resident of Memphis, TN, where I did a weekly radio show called "New Orleans: Under the Influence" from 1988 to 2004 on WEVL 89.9 FM. I've been collecting and researching this kind of music (& others) even longer.

HOTG Heads Up

Individual audio files are accessible for a limited time after posting. Link to access audio will be on the song title. No link? Audio's outa here*.

When you hit a song link, a player streams it in a separate window. For other listening options, right click on the player when it comes up.

Note: Audio files on this blog are not high resolution (usually 128k) and are posted for reference purposes only. Please do not link directly to them. Use caution if booty shaking while operating vehicles or heavy machinery. Whenever possible, please buy music by these artists!!!
*HEADS UP: If the audio is no longer available here, hit the affiliated site, HOTG Internet Radio, a fully licensed webcast streaming a huge playlist of songs from the HOTG Archives. So go on, get down with the get down.
EMAIL: hotgblog (AT) gmail (DOT) com
ARTISTS & LABELS (or reps thereof): Want to submit your New Orleans/Louisiana grooves for review or posting consideration,
or want an audio post discontinued? Email me.
COMMENTS, corrections, or further enlightenment are encouraged and appreciated. Due to a big spam attack, the comments
section is now moderated. Legitimate comments will be posted after review. Thanks for your understanding...and patience. NOTE:
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QUOTES OF NOTE:
"New Orleans is of such key importance to American music because historical factors combined to make it the strongest center of
African musical practice in the United States, and, cliches aside, that practice really did travel up the Mississippi and did
spread overland." - Ned Sublette, from Cuba And Its Music

"I heard a group called Huey Smith & the Clowns, out of New Orleans. Now this is where funk was really created! That's where funk originated....
I couldn't understand how to do it, so this drummer from Huey Smith's band [Hungry Williams] showed me how to play [it]." - Clayton Fillyau,
drummer for Etta James and James Brown, on the origins of the 'James Brown Beat', in The Great Drummers Of R&B, Funk & Soul, interviewed by Jim Payne.

"A lot of those New Orleans drummers would come through, and I got a lot of stuff from those guys....Tenoo [Coleman] was...as funky as any of them.....
I learned some of that funk by listening to Tenoo." - John 'Jabo'Starks, drummer for Bobby Bland and James Brown, to Jim Payne as above.

"At the risk of sounding egotistical, a lot of the broken up stuff that these guys are playing now stems from the stuff that I had started doing." -
Earl Palmer, on his early days drumming with Dave Bartholomew's band, to Jim Payne, as above.

"With funk, it's almost more what you don't play than what you do play. I like those long silences between riffs,
I like the empty spaces. Those empty spaces, when you stop and let the groove wash all over you, make the
difference between fake funk and real funk." -Art Neville in The Brothers Neville

"Thank the good Lord for the funk musicians." -Jon Cleary ("Pin Your Spin")

"Without New Orleans, there would be no America." -Keith Frazier, Rebirth Brass Band, 2005.

"....don't be fooled. This city is deeply wounded. I'd say it's like an amputee
with phantom memory." -David Freedman, WWOZ, post-Katrina.

"If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom."
-Judy Deck, in an e-mail to Chris Rose at the Times-Picayune

"I'm not finished!" - Wardell Quezergue's final comment of the night after accepting the 2008 Best of the Beat
Lifetime Achievement In Music Award from Offbeat

"I discovered New Orleans along the way, and that made a big difference - It loosened me up." - Richie Hayward, the late drummer for Little Feat.

Indians Comin', Get The Hell Out De Way

This is the flip side of the Wild Tchoupitoulas single I featuredlast month. You can find more background information on it and the group there.

Written by Big Chief Jolly (George Landry), “Meet De Boys On The Battlefront” is an interesting expression of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition. Boasting about their beautiful handcrafted suits and fighting spirit, his song tells of taking to the streets Mardi Gras morning to have “fun”, displaying, singing cryptic chants, drinking, and doing battle on the holiday. Of course, over the past 40 years or so, their battles have become ritualized public competition to see who has created the best regalia and shows out best on the streets, rather than the sometimes violent gang-style turf fights (using shanks, axes, and even guns) that kept the Indians underground and outside the law for many years earlier in the 20th century. Thanks to the Wild Tchoupitoulas and Wild Magnolias, Mardi Gras Indian music became a recognized genre unto itself and brought increased recognition and popularity to these once furtive, fringe figures.

After the Wild Magnolias mixed their traditional music with more linear, rawer funk grooves (see and hear the post below) in their historic collaborations with Willie Tee, the Wild Tchoupitoulas’ followed but did not copy, working with members of the Meters and Neville family to bring a more lilting, Caribbean feel to much of their music. “Meet De Boys On the Battlefront”, with its elements of reggae and calypso, has a casual, addictive island bounce. While the material on their eponymous album, from which the two single sides were taken, was their only recorded output, Big Chief Jolly’s tribe, family and friends created a unique cultural artifact with influences that reveal links to other avenues of the African diaspora than run through New Orleans’ many musical neighborhoods. Again, no serious fan of New Orleans music should be without it.

“Handa Wanda Pt 1 & Pt 2”, recorded in late 1970 and released as a single on the Crescent City label, marks the firstWild Magnoliasstudio session. It came about after Quint (“Cosmic Q”) Davis, a Tulane University student, budding promoter, and fan of Mardi Gras Indians, heard Big Chief Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias spontaneously jam with Willie Tee’s funk band, the Gaturs, at a campus concert earlier that year. Davis, who went on to become the long-time director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, was inspired to try to capture the magic he heard and set up a recording session for the Indians at Deep South Studios in Baton Rogue. For the backing band, he enlisted Tee on keyboards, ‘Zigaboo’ Modeliste on drums, and George French on bass. Members of the Wild Magnolias* provided the other percussion and vocals, with Bo Dollis on lead.

There’s just no denying the elemental energy and unvarnished funk of this track, maybe one of the most unrecognized masterpieces of in-studio wildness ever magnetized on tape and pressed into grooved vinyl. No, it’s not recorded all that well; and Tee and French are pretty much just vamping around. But Zig, Bo and the Indian brotherhood - on drums, congas, tambourines, bottles, whatever - issue forth an undulating percussive flood that sweeps away all obstacles and resistance to rhythmic body movement. Above this churning waves, Dollis’s raw scream of a vocal, surely born of gargling razor blades, tears through the roar and sears itself into you brain. Subsequent sessions raised the musical ante and recording quality; but it is hard to argue with what sounds like a newly discovered tribe from some lost continent. By comparison, the later Wild Tchoupitoulas record (see above), great as it is, sounds like funk parlor music.

As I mentioned ina previous post on the Wild Magnolias, the mixing of mysterious, primal Mardi Gras Indian music with the earthy, syncopated soul blossoming in New Orleans at the start of the 1970’s produced a musical blend still potent over three decades later. It seems inevitable in retrospect; but, it must have been a powerfully amazing, wondrous thing to behold at its inception, if this groundbreaking track is any indication.

4 Comments:

"Meet De Boys" is fantastic. It sounded a bit familiar so I got out my CD set "Treacherous: A History of The Neville Brothers" (Rhino 1988) and there it is, track 14 on Disc 1. Thanks for reminding me what great music I already have (and how great the Neville Brothers are). The 2-disc set is terrific, and still available on Amazon.com for $30-65 (!) -- http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00000334O/qid=1141068928/sr=1-9/ref=sr_1_9/103-7004644-9130228?v=glance&s=music - Anon in Boston

What a truly wonderful website you have here. Thanks so much for playing the best music in the world! Up here in Toronto, I know many fans of N'Orleans music, and Professor Longhair is 'the Bach of Rock", and so many other greats alongside 'Fess come from the Crescent City. Cheers!